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<\/a><\/p>\nConsensus:<\/p>\n
The working group agreed on a number of points, some methodological and some substantial, that are still considered controversial by others, or in some cases just not yet considered:<\/p>\n
1. We should be Darwinian about Darwinism; there are few if any bright lines between phenomena of cultural change for which cultural natural selection is clearly at work and phenomena of cultural change that are not at all Darwinian. The intermediate and mixed cases need not be marginal or degenerate, a fact nicely portrayed in Godfrey-Smith\u2019s Darwinian Spaces.<\/p>\n
2. Models must always \u201cover-\u201csimplify, and the existence of complications and even \u201ccounterexamples\u201d relative to any model does not automatically show that the model isn\u2019t valid when used with discretion. For instance, the absence of explicit treatment of SCM\u2019s \u201chetero-impacts\u201d in BRH\u2019s models \u201cdoes not amount to a denial of its importance\u201d(Godfrey-Smith). Grain level of modeling and explaining can vary appropriately depending on the questions being addressed.<\/p>\n
3. The traditional idea that human culture advances primarily by \u201cimprovisational intelligence,\u201d the contributions of insightful, intentional, comprehending individual minds, is largely mistaken. Just as plants and animals can be the beneficiaries of brilliant design enhancements that they cannot, and need not, understand, so we human beings enjoy culturally evolved competences that far outstrip our individual comprehension. Not only do we not need to \u201cre-invent the wheel,\u201d we do not need to appreciate or understand the design of many human institutions, technologies, and customs that nevertheless contribute to our welfare in various ways. Moreover (a point of agreement between Sperber and Boyd, for instance), the opacity of some cultural memes (their inscrutability to human comprehension) is often an enhancement to their fitness: \u201cThis opacity\u2014which is a matter of degree, of course\u2014is what makes social transmission so important. It plays, I believe, a crucial role in the acceptability of cultural traits: it is, in important ways easier to trust what you don\u2019t fully understand and hence cannot properly evaluate on its own merits.\u201d (Sperber)<\/p>\n
4. The persistence of cultural features that are not fitness-enhancing, and may even be fitness-reducing, is to be expected in cultural evolution, and can have a variety of explanations.<\/p>\n
New questions:<\/p>\n
1. Rob Boyd, in his post-working group summary, proposed a way in which the Evolutionary Causal Matrix idea developed by Sperber and Claidi\u00e8re can be re-expressed in the population genetics formalism used by BRH, raising questions about how\u2014if at all\u2014the homo-impact\/hetero-impact distinction introduced by SCM appears in the population genetics formalism. Do SCM have a reply?[1]\n
2. SCM propose that cultural attraction, not differential replication, accounts for much of the dynamics of cultural evolution [2](in the neutral sense: change over time), but several expressed concern that only a (quasi-)Darwinian process can initiate and refine adaptations (lifting in Design Space). One line of thought suggests that attraction and replication can sometimes work together: attractors act rather like norms to somewhat digitize otherwise continuous variations, making exemplars stable and distinct enough to be eligible for iterated replication and selection. Another line of thought is that the distinction between attraction and differential replication is maybe just a question of \u201czoom\u201d: if you zoom in on apparent replicators, you may find that they are not, strictly speaking, replicating at all, but if you zoom out, the results are as if there was replication going on.[3] Which of these suggestions will survive further research? For instance, are there experiments (Claidi\u00e8re\u2019s question) that can distinguish the roles of transformative and selective processes, shedding light on the conditions under which each plays the dominant role?<\/p>\n
3. \u201cIf individuals are smart enough in their choices, the BRH meso-level picture fades. When people are smart and make good choices, the recurrence of good options and accumulation of design can occur without imitation-and-selection.\u201d (Godfrey-Smith) But Sperber points out that this need not pose a dichotomous choice between evolutionary and rational-choice explanations: \u201cadding attraction to the cultural evolution story allows us to integrate evolved mechanisms that tend to produce rational choices, not as an alternative kind of explanation, but as a factor of attraction among many.\u201d Under what conditions can this proposed unification do serious explanatory work? Since attractors can be both enhancers and decelerators of adaptive change, are they too versatile to be explanatory (at least in this context)? [4]\n
4. Is cultural evolution \u201cde-Darwinizing\u201d (Godfrey-Smith\u2019s term for phenomena that evolve into less Darwinian phenomena)? Dennett says yes: in the earliest days of human cultural evolution, individuals were largely uncomprehending beneficiaries of their new tools and customs, only gradually becoming reflective, critical, foresighted users of those tools. Today they aspire to be intelligent (re-)designers of every aspect of their environments, and some of the major changes in culture today are the products of quite concentrated, not distributed, R&D.[5] Blackmore says no: on the contrary, technology has raised the proportion of high-fidelity copying and transmission, and is beginning to usurp the role of the supposedly intelligent designer thanks to automated search and evaluation systems. Will all roles for human \u201cimprovisational intelligence\u201d become obsolete, and \u201cinventors\u201d as rare are telephone operators, coopers, and scythe-sharpeners in the future? Or will the heretofore unreachable ideal of the intelligent designer be approximated by individual human beings, thanks to their reliance on technology (including especially instruction and the cascade of scientific knowledge that creates new platforms from which to begin one\u2019s exploration)? Human civilization today appears to be a volatile mix of these opposing trends; are there investigations that can clarify the resultant direction in which we are heading?<\/p>\n
5. Richerson raises an issue (among many others) that we did not have time to discuss: \u201cNatural selection on genes admits of a number of modes. . . . . .Throw in density and frequency-dependent selection. . . . . Mate choice and artificial selection introduce agent-based rather than natural selection, demi-god designers if you want. With cultural evolution agent-based social selection runs wild.\u201d Does this point to a good way to organize the intermediate space between paradigmatic \u201cDarwinian\u201d natural selection and intelligent design? One thing that is changing in this progression might be called the focus of the selection pressure. At the Darwinian pole (simple natural selection) the selection pressure is \u201cjust\u201d a statistical net effect of a kazillion independent events that determine which candidates get replicated; in the middle-ground, mate choice (as Geoffrey Miller has argued) is focused through the perceptual\/cognitive\/emotional dispositions of individual (usually female) \u201cminds,\u201d with varying degrees of comprehension and reflection; it is like Darwin\u2019s \u201cunconscious\u201d selection which bridges the gap between agentless natural selection and reflective, intentional \u201cmethodical\u201d selection. As agents (conceived as mere concentrations of selective efficacy, selective \u201chot spots\u201d in the environment)[6] become more discerning, the importance of high-fidelity replication does not lapse, but the breadth of \u201csearch\u201d contracts and R&D can become more efficient (it can also hasten the ruin of ill-informed R&D). As reflectivity about this very process increases, R&D becomes faster and more efficient\u2014but gradually, allowing for opaque attractors to play a large role relative to genuinely insightful or comprehending quality judgments. Does this proposal withstand scrutiny?<\/p>\n
\n[1] Richerson commented on the draft of this document and Sperber replied:<\/p>\n
Richerson: I thought that the attraction concept had become sufficiently generalized as to obviate this distinction. Perhaps complete resolution of this issue need to await SCM\u2019s development of their models. With a fully functional model in hand, we can see if the structure of them differs in some fundamental way from the population genetics based models I\u2019m more familiar with.<\/p>\n
Sperber: My first reaction to Rob\u2019s comments was, to begin with, sheer joy at having him discuss ECM seriously. Given Rob\u2019s experience and competence, this cannot but be good for the science. Were Rob to find that there is a basic flow in the ECM approach, then we would be spared going in the wrong direction, and again, good for science. Rob might also find ways to correct and improve the ECM format at least for some use, and this would be nice, of course.<\/p>\n
Now, regarding, the fact that \u201cthe ECM formalism can be equivalent ways of representing exactly the same underlying processes,\u201d I like Rob\u2019s illustration, and Nicolas and I had found other examples in our work in the past. I don\u2019t see this as an objection, especially since we didn\u2019t propose the ECM format as it stands as an alternative way to model population phenomena of interest, let alone as a better way. We offered it as to begin with a Dennettian \u2018intuition pump\u2019, leaving open the question whether it could, at least in some cases, be developed into a perspicuous way of modeling. The intuition pump effectiveness was, for me, demonstrated at our workshop and in several other exchanges I have had: people who didn\u2019t quite \u2018get\u2019 the attraction idea, found it much easier and even congenial when so presented.<\/p>\n
On the further more technical points raised by Rob, I would like to coordinate at least with Nicolas and Thom before providing a careful reaction.<\/p>\n[2] Sperber: What we propose is that hetero-attraction is likely to be more or much more than a marginal factor in cultural evolution, making a generalized notion of attraction that includes both homo and hetero-attraction \u2013 I agree with Pete with his comment on this point \u2013 potentially quite useful. This by itself does not determine which is the best way to model cultural evolution, or precludes the possibility that different models may be better for different types of cases.<\/p>\n[3] Sperber: Here I agree with a remark Rob made in his comments: yes we, the attraction people tend to zoom towards greater details, but this doesn\u2019t necessarily preclude the possibility that on some issues at least, a more standard population genetics provides for a better zoom.<\/p>\n[4] Sperber: Here you want to talk about specific factors of attraction and the way they may contribute to adaptiveness, or to the resilience of non-adaptive features. The relevant point here is that the evolved ability to recognize and, under certain conditions, even design well-adapted things is a powerful factor of attraction that contribute to explaining the cultural success of well-adapted things. You get your evolutionary explanation, as usual by looking at micro-processes at a population scale. The fact that, in this case, rational choice modeling can also make the right prediction does not in any way undermine a more standard evolutionary approach (that moreover does better at least in terms of generality and of psychological plausibility).<\/p>\n[5] Richerson: Nuts Dan! Highly innovative places like Silicon Valley are Darwinian pressure cookers. First, the finest engineering training available in the world dumps the max amount of accumulated wisdom into the heads of the best and brightest. Then the B&B are set to work finding marginal improvements in existing designs to patent. Entrepreneurial teams funded by venture capitalists recombine old designs and add the latest new patented ideas to create products that are selected in ruthlessly competitive markets.<\/p>\n
Dennett responds: But this Darwinian \u201cpressure cooker\u201d is distant from the Darwinian paradigm in several important dimensions: it is what Darwin himself called \u201cmethodical selection\u201d (in his wonderful introductory passage that segues from the (intelligent) selective actions of plant and animal breeders, through the \u201cunconscious selection\u201d of the inadvertent, or largely purposeless biases of human beings in the early days of agriculture, to \u201cnatural selection\u201d (in which no mind, intelligent or clueless, is required). The search space is pinched by many preconceptions, good and bad, and, as in sexual selection, the winners have been aggressively tested by nervous systems tuned to detect quality.<\/p>\n[6] Sperber: Yes, let\u2019s not overdo \u2018agents\u2019. \u2018\u201cHot spots\u201d in the environment\u2019 is a nice metaphor. Another, more detailed way to go is to see cognition both as massively modular and heavily situated\/distributed. At this point, the individual organism is still in play, but most cultural phenomena are both infra- and trans-individual (or to use Dennettian terms, sub-personal and collective) The agents that rational choice theorist theorize about not only don\u2019t exist \u2013 that is not too bad \u2013, they are not, I believe, a very good idealization for modeling cultural evolution (this might be a point of difference between the attraction approach and the agents-choose-variant approach).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These are Daniel Dennett’s introductory remarks on the workshop on cultural evolution he conveyed in Santa Fe in May 2014. (Footnotes contain comments by Richerson and Sperber.) *** Ever since Darwin\u2019s Descent of Man (1871), the idea of adopting an evolutionary perspective on human culture has seemed to many to be a natural move, obviously […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2235,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n